Drinking mugs and beverage containers have been adapted over the years to facilitate beverage consumption during travel activities such as walking or riding in an automobile, bus, train or airplane. Traditional coffee mugs are not suitable for drinking beverages while traveling because they easily spill their contents, and are often heavy and prone to breakage if dropped. These problems coupled with the public's desire to save time by consuming their beverages while traveling has led to the increased popularity of beverage containers suitable for use during travel. Commuters often fill such containers with their morning coffee, tea, juice, etc. to consume during their journey to work each day. These containers, as known in the art, usually consist of an insulated container body, or body member, for maintaining the temperature of the contained beverage and a lid member with a smaller drinking aperture that fits securely over the container member to minimize spillage during drinking. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,249,703 to Karp, U.S. Pat. No. 5,918,761 to Wissinger, and U.S. Design Pat. No. 399,392 to Husted.
Many prior art travel mugs have a small cover over the drinking aperture which must be manually opened by the user's hand or mouth when the user wishes to take a drink. Such containers often include an air-tight seal between the cover and the drinking aperture in order to maintain the temperature of the beverage. But such sealing connections may often require substantial user effort to open and/or properly close the lid because the air-tight seal must be formed or broken in each instance. If the container is full, undesirable spillage may occur when the air-tight seal is broken between the cover and aperture because the cover may unexpectedly and abruptly open in response to the user-applied force. This can defeat the purpose of the lid entirely.
Still other prior art beverage containers include a cover over the drinking aperture operated by a lever. In order to drink from the mug, the user must depress and hold the lever to gain access to the drinking aperture. But in order for the user to drink from this type of container, he or she must continuously depress the lever while holding the mug to his or her mouth, which may be awkward and/or uncomfortable.
Thus, there is a need for a container having a controlled-opening lid that prevents spillage of contents during opening and/or closing. The lid of such a container would open in a moderated fashion to produce a smooth, pleasing effect in response to a minimal amount of user effort.